One fix. One Friday. This week: the series that's been running on a document that stopped being true two books ago. The problem nobody names until book six Here's how it happens. You write book one. You build a Series Bible, careful and thorough, everything you planned for twelve books. You publish. You write book two. Things change, characters surprise you, a subplot goes somewhere you didn't expect. You mean to update the bible. You don't. You write book three. Same thing. By the time you're planning book four you're working from a document that reflects the series you intended, not the series you actually wrote, and the two have quietly diverged in ways that are going to cost you. This is the stale bible problem, and it is invisible until it isn't. It shows up as a character who somehow forgot something they learned in book two, a plot thread that was urgent in book one and simply never came up again, a tone that drifted between books without anyone deciding it should. The readers notice before you do. The emails are polite. The reviews are not. I know this because I'm living it right now with the Tales from the Hollow Bean. The Hollow Bean situation Twelve books planned. Three published. Books four, five, and six in production. And somewhere between writing book one and planning book four, the series got darker. Not accidentally, on purpose, the story needed it. Todd's world is more complicated than it looked from the cozy side of the counter, and the people sitting around that D&D table are carrying more weight than a sweet urban fantasy suggests. Mary's background is much darker still with a new subplot that she caused and has to deal with eventually. That's a real creative decision and I stand behind it. What I didn't do is update the Series Bible to reflect it. Which means the document that books four, five, and six are being planned against still describes a series with a warmer emotional register than the one I'm actually writing. The bible is lying to me, and I've been letting it.

One fix. One Friday. This week: the free book that got you nothing back. So I did the thing again, and this time I did it in front of everybody. I gave a book away free for a week, shared it in a pile of groups, watched the downloads climb, felt great about it, and then realized I'd left the door wide open and never asked anyone to sign the guest book. No landing page. No email capture. Nothing. Sigh. Here's the part that stings, and it isn't the lost sales. The book did fine. It's actually my best seller now, which is funny and annoying in equal measure. What stings is that I handed a big, interested audience a gift and walked away with no way to ever talk to them again. The goodwill was real. It just had nowhere to go. The problem Free isn't generosity. Free is a trade where one side forgot to name the price. The reader who grabs your free book hasn't done anything wrong. They took what was offered. The obligation was mine to set up, and I skipped it, because giving feels nice and asking feels awkward. But every free thing creates a small debt that runs in one direction or the other. Decide which direction, or the debt quietly lands on you, and you eat the cost of the printing, the hosting, the time, the promo, all of it. (Tangent: "free" always has a bill somewhere. It's just a question of whose name is on it.) So the rule is simple, and I'm saying it out loud so you can hold me to it: never give anything away without a trade. A trade doesn't have to be money. It can be an email address, a review, a click on the next book. It just has to be something, named, in exchange. Whew. The diagnostic: three checks before any free promo 1. Is there a landing page that captures an email before the download? If the book goes straight from "free" to "in their hands," you've skipped the only moment you had to ask. 2. Does the back matter ask for something specific? A review, the newsletter, the next book. One ask, not a thank-you note and a list of titles. 3. Can I say, in one sentence, what I get in exchange? If I can't, the answer is nothing, and I'm about to do it again.

I'm seeing a lot of errors related to API Key usage in the error logs and have put a quick two minute video on this below. What I'm seeing is the Wrong model being chosen for the wrong API key and API keys running out of funds. Happens to me all the time as I only put $20 on at a time. When you go to one of the skill rooms, just make sure you choose the provider for your API key and the model you want to use and the effort (if that model has efforts). Medium is good for most prose, low is good for Q&A to save some costs.

Moving In (Bringing Your Existing Work Into the WCP Binder) Here's a thing I hear almost every week in some form: "I'd love to try WordCrafter, but I already have three books started somewhere else. Do I have to start over?" No. And the reason matters, because a lot of the fear around switching tools is really fear of losing work. So this week we walk the whole path, from "I have a pile of files" to "my book lives in the Binder, tagged, sorted, and ready for the rooms." One promise first: importing doesn't touch your originals. Whatever you bring in is a copy. Your old files stay exactly where they were. What You Can Bring With You WordCrafter's importer handles most of what writers actually have: Word (DOCX) Plain text and Markdown EPUB PDF (including a scanned or image-based PDF, via the OCR option) HTML, RTF and ODT Scrivener projects NovelCrafter exports RaptorWrite exports (JSON or Markdown) Sudowrite import was still being worked on the last time I updated this list. If that's your source, export to Word or Markdown and import that instead. It's a reliable bridge. A test I'm proud of: I exported all nine of my NovelCrafter projects and imported every one of them. If you started something somewhere else, you can finish it here. And if WCP turns out not to be for you, there are multiple ways out too, including Word, EPUB, PDF and Scrivener export. Step 1: Make Somewhere to Put It Import always lands in a book. This is where the Binder trips people up, so here's the picture that makes it click: A Series or Group is a file cabinet. A Book or Type is a drawer in that cabinet. Your folders and files are the pages inside the drawer. Those names are loose on purpose. Your "Series" could be a pen name, a genre, or a pile of short stories. Your "Book" could be a novel, a collection, or a drawer called "Old Drafts." So before you import anything: Click + New in the Binder and create your Series or Project. You can convert one to the other later with a right-click, so don't agonize over it.

I've created a (somewhat) clear workflows document. This will be added into the WCP manual in the software as well and as usual is a baby step to something else. a more interactive website version to walk you through step by step and integrated into the upcoming Author EcoSystem and Writer's Desk. In researching more ways to help non AI writers I've come across some really interesting new things to help all of us out along the way. Writing, workflows, the business side, creativity, and productivity boosts.